sex

He is over 100 years old, weighs about 175 pounds, is nearly 35 inches long, five feet tall, and the ladies love him. His name is Diego. Diego the Chelonoidis hoodensis Galapagos giant tortoise.

According to Washington Tapia, a tortoise preservation specialist at Galapagos National Park, Diego "has fathered an estimated 800 offspring, almost single-handedly rebuilding the species' population--and saving it from extinction--on their native island, Espanola, the southernmost in the Galapagos Archipelago."

"Around 50 years ago, there were only two males and 12 females of Diego's species alive on Espanola, and they were too spread out to reproduce."

Six years ago, they did a genetic study and discovered that Diego was the
father of nearly 40 percent of the offspring released into the wild on Espanola, thereby doing more parenting than any other turtle to repopulate the species.

"He's a very sexually active male reproducer. He's contributed enormously to repopulating the island," said Tapia.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson made a lot of people (and presumably ducks, cats and bedbugs) angry with a much less than true fact about sex and evolution. His claim, that sex doesn't hurt any species had many Twitter users jumping to correct him.

And you might be thinking, he's just trying to be positive about human sexuality and say, in his own pseudoscientific way that it's healthy and painless for humans. But... that's actually not true either:

Tattoo Earth's 4.5-billion-year timeline onto your arm, shoulder to fingertip, and your upper arm will get nothing but geologic mayhem: meteorites, magma, acid rain. Life won't begin until your bicep, and from there to your wrist it's all single-celled, oceangoing stuff. Reproductive sex won't show up until your wristwatch, and creatures that are finally big enough to see—tubes and fronds and weird Precambrian plant-animals—will crisscross the back of your hand.